I’m coughing my ass off while trying to keep up the pace and clear my lungs from the smoke I inhaled while touring the mess that Troy Savage made of Hartmann’s mansion.
“Stay with me, Rachel!” I scream, watching in satisfaction as her long shadow catches up to me.
“Where is that damned helicopter?” she asks.
Scanning the clearing, verifying that there are no guards on this side of the grounds, I shake my head while huffing and puffing, Karen’s weight drilling holes in my shoulders and elbows. I’ll have to set her down soon but can’t do it in the middle of this lawn lest I want to turn this chase into a turkey shoot.
So I keep up the pace, ignoring my pathetically out-of-shape body, my burning legs, my aching lungs as I breathe in short sobbing gasps.
Rachel trots past me like a thoroughbred mare, long legs swinging as she reaches the tree line seconds before I do.
“What now?” she asks, covering me with her MP5T as I finally catch up with her and set Karen down on a thick layer of fallen leaves behind a row of waist-high shrubs, taking a moment to catch my breath before checking the wound, verifying that for now it has stopped bleeding.
“Now . . . we wait,” I say, my chest swelling as I try to force as much oxygen into my system as I can while checking the homing device strapped to my right wrist, verifying that it is still ticking, then realizing that it is not just a homing unit but a pretty damned fancy nanogadget, with a built-in two-way radio, a GPS finder, plus it even tells the time.
Now that we’re far away enough from the mansion I get a full appreciation of the extent of the fire, which has spread to all four floors and along this side of the mansion.
Emergency vehicles finally make it up the hill and stop by the front gate. Unfortunately for them—and fortunately for us—the thick iron gate isn’t moving, and a little voice tells me Troy had something to do with that.
Peering through the branches at the array of blinking lights on the other side of the gate, and the half-dozen guards on this side trying to get it open, I silently concede that Troy definitely had the gift.
And then there’s the fire consuming the woods on the other side of the mansion and moving toward the front, threatening to engulf the trees lining the access road and flanking the gate itself—meaning the emergency vehicles will have to back off or risk getting swallowed by the rapidly spreading inferno.
Troy’s inferno.
Everything had gone according to his plan. Troy’s team had gone in, performed their assigned sabotage tasks to create the synchronized diversions, and then pulled back, leaving the door wide open for the termination team of Troy and—
“Tom . . . cold . . .”
Kneeling by her side while Rachel keeps an eye out for guards or the rescue chopper, I hold Karen’s hand.
“I’m here, honey,” I reply, no longer caring what Rachel thinks. Damn it, I loved this woman, and in a way a part of me still does—at least based on the gut-ripping feeling twisting inside of me at the sight of her blood, of her quivering lips, of her pale face.
The field dressing has staunched the hemorrhage, but she has apparently already lost enough blood to send her system to the brink of shock. She needs medical assistance, and pronto, before she—
“Sorry . . .” she says, her eyes finding mine in the flickering twilight created by the distant flames. “Should have . . . gone with you . . . year ago.”
“Don’t say that,” I reply, forcing back the tears, silently cursing this terrible turn of events. “You followed your heart. I know you care for me. I know that, and that was good enough for me . . . still is.”
Karen Frost starts to tremble, to shudder as she closes her eyes. “Tom . . . I . . . cold.”
“You fight this, Karen,” I hiss by her ear. “Don’t you dare leave me here alone. Do you hear me? You can’t leave me like this. I need you!”
Rachel glances my way for a moment before resuming her watch of the grounds and the skies above.
Karen stares at me with her large brown eyes, glistening with tears. “I . . . can’t . . . I—”
“It’s here!” announces Rachel. “The chopper’s here!”
“Did you hear that, Karen?” I tell her as I lift her light frame, once again cradling her like I would a baby.
Beyond the branches outlining the forest drops a massive black ship, the roaring flames from the mansion drowning the already muffled whop-whop sounds of its stealth rotor as it touches down on the lawn halfway between the tree line and the burning mansion, about fifty feet from where we are.
“Let’s go!” Rachel shouts, starting toward the waiting craft, whose side door swings open.
I go after her, no longer holding a weapon, no longer caring to hold anything except for Karen Frost, the woman that I realize I still love, I still wish to spend the rest of my life with.
The staccato gunfire rattles the night, rising above the roaring flames. The guards by the front gate have spotted us and are now racing toward us.
The ground explodes in front of me.
I cut left, then right, doing my darnedest to add a zigzagging motion to my sprint in order to make myself a harder target.
Rachel gets to the chopper while I’m barely reaching the halfway point.
“Come on, Tom!” she shouts at the top of her lungs, before pointing her MP5T at the incoming guards and cutting loose a dozen rounds. In the same instant, two soldiers jump out of the helicopter dragging a body, which they dump by the rear of the craft before swinging their machine guns at the guards.
I drop my gaze at the body, riddled with bullets but still clutching a machine gun in his dead fingers.
Rem Vlachko.
What in the world is he doing in this—
Multiple reports pierce the night, and from the corner of my right eye I see guards falling to the lawn roughly a hundred feet from me. But in the same instant more guards appear from around the rear of the mansion, their muzzles alive with gunfire. Several rounds ricochet off the armored skin of the stealth helicopter.
“Tom!”
I’m almost there, nearly out of breath, kicking my legs as hard as I possibly—
An invisible fist punches my left torso, and the subsequent burning pain that nearly makes me lose control of my bladder tells me I’ve been shot. Before my mind has a chance to register it, another bullet wallops into me on the same side, the sting spreading up my neck and down my ass.
Mustering every last ounce of strength left in me and channeling it to my quivering legs, I take the last three steps, before jumping in, twisting my body in midair to land on my back in the metallic troop carrier bay of the helicopter.
My vision tunneling, I feel the warmth propagating through my body, and in the same instant I realize that I have just pissed on myself.
I feel hands all around me, tugging not at me but at Karen Frost.
I hold her tight even though I have no control of my arms, which have developed a mind of their own, refusing to let her go, refusing to let anyone take her away from me.
“Sir! Please! You have to let her go!” shouts a soldier, a blond kid in a U.S. Marine field uniform who looks like he’s sixteen. “We’re medics! We’ve got her now!”
My arms finally give and I’m suddenly alone, lying flat on my back in my own piss hugging my own self while trembling, the burning pain scourging my back, my torso, my legs.
“Oh, my God! You’ve been shot!” screams Rachel, kneeling by my side as I sense upward motion.
Another medic, this one completely bald, like me, and in his thirties, kneels next to her and starts to do something to my left side with a pair of scissors.
I try to lift my head, but the crippling sting skyrockets, shooting waves of raw pain down my shivering body.
I try to breathe, but even that hurts like a motherfucker, forcing me to remain still, arms and legs quivering so hard that I feel Rachel holding them down, along with one of the soldiers.
My vision starts to tunnel as everything from my neck down becomes numb, as I half-feel, half-see gloved hands tearing into my side, cutting into me, apparently digging for oil. Someone says something about clamping a torn artery, or something like that.
And so I make the mistake of turning my head away from my own misery, my stare landing on a sight I know I won’t forget for as long as I live: the image of Karen Frost, naked from the waist up, her lifeless eyes fixated on a spot on the ceiling as the blond medic applies a battlefield dressing to her chest.
“Fuck! She’s gone into cardiac arrest!” he shouts at a third medic, this one black and wearing a stethoscope. He drops a syringe and grabs a white metallic case, snapping it open, snagging the pads of an automated external defibrillator, thick coiled wire connecting them to the unit.
I blink away the tears at the surreal sight, my chest aching with grief, nearly choking me as I continue to stare into her dead eyes.
“Clear!” the black medic shouts.
The blond medic dressing her wound backs off for an instant as the shock causes her upper body to rise a few inches before falling back down.
“She’s not responding,” says the older medic treating me. “Shock her again!”
“Clear!”
I continue to stare at her beautiful eyes, at her frozen expression as the medic keeps working on her, refusing to give up, shocking her again and again to no avail.
The tunnel that has become my world continues to narrow, until all I see is her distant face, her brown eyes, glistening in the gray light, as beautiful as ever.
I feel the end nearing. I feel my heart hastening, then slowing down, then increasing in tempo again, but irregularly, stomping my chest.
As I’m ready to also surrender myself to the damage caused by bullets that the TechnoSuit was supposed to stop, I sense something clasping my head, turning it away from Karen Frost.
“You hang in there, mister! You hang in there, you hear me?” says Rachel, her narrow face filling my field of view, her green eyes staring straight down at me.
I swallow hard, my emotions in as much havoc as my body, but I do manage to take a deep breath before exhaling through my mouth.
“You fight this, Tom Grant! Do you hear me? You fight this! Don’t you dare die on me!”
My confused mind is trying to register her words—or were those my words, the ones I said to Karen by the tree line?
“You hang in there! You fight this, dammit! Fight it!”
I try to keep up with the nightmarish events whirling around me like a cyclone, threatening to uproot my sanity, to swallow everything, the rattling noise, the shouts, the terrifying numbness gripping me, the gut-wrenching sight of Karen’s dead eyes and Rachel’s pleading stare.
Until slowly, oh, so slowly, everything fades away.